Chekkt: A Place To Discover Business Management Software

You’ve probably encountered this problem. You are searching for a software tool. Let’s say you’re looking for project management software. You go to Google or Bing. After an hour of jumping back and forth between the search engine and a handful of websites, you’re confused. Some sites talk about time tracking. Others talk about milestones. Still others talk about collaboration suites. You don’t have a way to see a snapshot at a glance and compare apples to apples. What’s worse is that you have no idea what else is on the market that you might be missing.

Enter Chekkt.com. Chekkt was just launched last week. It’s designed to be a marketplace for business owners and managers to search for, discover and compare online software to manage a business.

According to Ori Manor, Chekkt’s founder and CEO, the company is solving an all-too-common pain point, and one he experienced. While working in another company, he and his team discovered how difficult the process is to find business software.

That, he said in an interview, is when he came up with the idea of Chekkt. He and his team were having trouble finding business management software that they needed. “For startups and businesses today it’s hard to discover business software services that are available on the market. It’s even harder to find out if they are relevant to your business,” he said.

Manor decided to do something about it and pulled together a group of investors, including ValueShine Ventures, a company he is a partner in, along with Israel Tech Trust and a few others. They raised a seed investment round of $1.25 million in June of 2013. That’s when work began in earnest to design the B2B marketplace platform.

The Tel Aviv based company started out by attracting vendors to the site. Today the site has information from 1200 vendors, like this one of HeatSync.

A Vision to Consumerize How Businesses Find Software

Chekkt is designed for buyers from small and midsize businesses, startups, agencies and freelancers.

Chekkt wants to ‘consumerize’ the search for business software. “We want to make buying B2B software as easy as buying a consumer product,” said Manor. Chekkt sees itself evolving into more than just information and reviews, but a place that makes the process of subscribing easier and faster, too.

Other software directories and marketplaces are on the market, but Manor thinks they are designed to serve other purposes. Extension marketplaces may be run by one large software service or platform, and list those with integrations or APIs to their software — think IntuitApps.com. Other marketplaces, such as GetApp, are review sites.

Manor insists that Chekkt will be different. Today it has information on the software services, including what the software does and pricing. Chekkt also has special offers for some software (see pictured below).

In the future, Chekkt has plans to allow buyers to subscribe to and pay without leaving the site, and it will even open up the user’s account with the vendor automatically. Eventually, Chekkt plans to charge a transaction fee if the purchase of an online software subscription is made through the site.

Right now, a priority for the company is to grow the number of vendors in the site. That’s essential, Manor says, to serving buyers. “Buyers want to go to the biggest marketplace where they find the most choices,” Manor added.

Manor says it’s hard to determine how many business process software products there are on the market today. “Our best estimate is 30,000 to 50,000 vendors,” Manor told us.

It’s a huge market. According to a Gartner report, it’s a $129 billion industry annually, just for business process software services. But the market is fragmented. There’s no single place to find and buy every software.

Vendors can submit their software service via this form. Chekkt does not a charge a fee to be listed as a vendor and, according to Manor, he does not foresee that changing. Vendors will have opportunities to purchase premium services and enhanced visibility.

“We’re coming from a sincere place,” Manor told us here at Small Business Trends. “We know that running a business means juggling many balls at once, and if you move one ball everything can collapse. We’re trying to make it easier for startups and small businesses to find software they can leverage to run better and faster, and grow.”

Anita Campbell is the Founder and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses, and also serves as CEO of TweakYourBiz.com.

Hi Robert, I appreciate it but I’m not such a rockstar salesman. We had an Alpha site when we raised our seed round that exemplified the true power of our platform. I’m definitely in love with Chekkt, but that didn’t matter to our investors – the product did.

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